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brindafella writes "Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. The two teams have now been recognized with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Half of the prize will go to Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project. The other half will be shared by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who led the High-z Supernova Search Team, and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on High-z. In essence, they proved that Einstein's 'biggest mistake' (the cosmological constant, to create a 'stable universe') was actually a clever theoretical prediction that there was something else happening — dark energy."

You might be thinking of the Peace Prize. The scientific ones are awarded for work which has withstood the tests of time. Without checking, I think that to get a Nobel in physics for work done a mere decade ago is unusually fast.

I get that this is the Nobel prize - but these people appear to have already accomplished something. Indeed, the noteworthy achievement for which they are receiving the prize is over a decade in the past. I thought the Nobel prize was awarded to encourage responsible action?

By the way, what the hell is up with "dividing" a Nobel prize like it's some sort of peach pie? Half for one white male, while the other two share the other half?

Not all "most important [discoveries] or [inventions] within the field of physics" - or any of the other fields for which there are Nobel prizes - can be uniquely credited to one individual. (And sometimes it's split between Asians, or between an Asian and a white guy, or....:-))

Who comes up with this stuff?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [nobelprize.org]. (Hint: you may think that as a random geek with a/. account and an opinion, you're smarter than they all are. That is not necessarily the case. HTH.)